Windmills of Your Mind
by Lyra Matsuoka
Summary: Sarah Williams is different now. She has changed in ways that not even she fully understands. And there must be a reason why...JS


Hi all! So, this is a little Sarah piece with a little S/J action toward the end. Mostly I was feeling angsty and romantic at the same time. Imagine the song like background music - it's the Sting and the Police version. Woo hoo!  
  
Disclaimer: I own neither characters nor song. It's a harsh world.  
  
The Windmills of Your Mind By Lyra Matusoka Rated PG (for the most part.)  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Round,  
  
Like a circle in a spiral  
  
Like a wheel within a wheel  
  
Never ending or beginning  
  
On an ever-spinning reel  
  
Like a snowball down a mountain  
  
Or a carnival balloon  
  
Like a carousel that's turning  
  
Running rings around the moon  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
Relationships were interesting things.  
  
That was the subject that Sarah had taken to pondering this balmy spring evening. Relationships, and the effect that they had on a person, provided a nice train of thought as Sarah carefully tuned out the dull roar of traffic and the blinking neon sign from the Blockbuster video that occupied the next building. No one knew what she was thinking about, though the employees and other customers avoided her as carefully as though she were formulating a cure for cancer.  
  
Often enough, Sarah Williams could be found sitting outside a local café, staring absently at the stars as night fell. Her coffee sat before her, growing colder as the night wore on. The staff avoided her table, since she never asked for a refill. Occasionally, a brand new employee would take it into his or her head to remind the strange young woman with the long brown hair of the 'Two Hour Table' rule. And when they did, the offending server would meet the cool green gaze and stammer some idiotic apology, returning to the counter with a slightly haunted look on their face.  
  
No employee ever asked Sarah Williams to move along more than once.  
  
Sarah took a deep breath and tore her gaze from the darkening sky. She stood, placed a few dollars on the table and walked slowly away from the café. She spoke to no one, and no one raised their voice in greeting to her.  
  
Sarah Williams stood alone against the world.  
  
In this small town, minds were generally black and white. Citizens grouped their neighbors, friends, and acquaintances as 'friendly', 'genial', 'solid' or variations on the theme that no one would be so crass as to label 'normal'. The Williams's, as a family unit, fell into those groupings. Robert, a husband, father, businessman, a golfer and a regular attendee of local philanthropic events; Karen, wife, mother, involved with her son and the PTSA; Toby, kindergartener and star of the school Christmas pageant in his role as mischievous elf. It was Sarah who worried the neighbors. Fanciful, flighty Sarah, with her costumes and her plays and her penetrating stare - some said she was one of the Faeries, others said she was cursed. Regardless of what they thought, people avoided Sarah, and the fervent hope of many that she would go away to college and leave this quiet town behind her continued to be denied. Sarah was now twenty years old. She worked in a book and novelty store, where she stocked the shelves and ordered merchandise and kept well away from the customers.  
  
Sarah Williams showed no sign of leaving.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Like a clock whose hands are sweeping  
  
Past the minutes on its face  
  
And the world is like an apple  
  
Whirling silently in space  
  
Like the circles that you find  
  
In the windmills of your mind *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
Sarah walked quietly and softly down the main thoroughfare, heading for her two room apartment three blocks down. She was still lost in thought. She knew exactly what people in this town thought of her. She knew why they crossed the street when she came walking toward them, knew why she was never bothered at restaurants or in shops, no matter how long she stayed or what she did. She often wondered if she might be able to simply take merchandise from the shelves and walk out the door with the items. It seemed to her that no one would attempt to stop her.  
  
Relationships were interesting things.  
  
Her relationship with this town was one of familiarity and lack of drive. She had been beyond the looking glass, seen a world full of magic and wonder and nothing could compare to that. Once upon a time, the glittering lights of the city seemed to offer hope and promise. Now they looked glaring and fake. Sarah had no desire to venture outside of this town, and this town would never force her out.  
  
Her relationship with her family was tense and at times disquieting. Karen watched her with suspicion and an edge of cruelty, taking jabs at Sarah's lifestyle. Robert watched his daughter from afar, no longer connected to the girl she had been and having little desire to connect with the woman she was. And Toby, Toby was a ray of sunshine. But he was not *her* ray of sunshine. And that made all the difference in the world.  
  
What no one seemed to understand about Sarah was that she had found a place of perfect self-awareness. She knew her faults and her achievements; she knew her strengths and her weaknesses.  
  
And better than almost anyone in the world, she knew her mistakes.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Like a tunnel that you follow  
  
To a tunnel of its own  
  
Down a hollow to a cavern  
  
Where the sun has never shone  
  
Like a door that keeps revolving  
  
In a half-forgotten dream  
  
Like the ripples from a pebble  
  
Someone tosses in a stream  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
The race through the Underground was an incidental side note in her visit now. The chase to recapture her brother, the battles with helping hands and drugged peaches, the illusions and the Bog, all in an attempt to best the one person who might have helped her. Sarah knew that she was shutting herself off from the human world. It was growing dangerous. It was harder and harder now to bring herself back from her memories and into the dark, cruel world she inhabited. Sarah did not want to be in this world anymore. She longed for the Underground, for a place filled with magic and enchantment and creatures most in this world could never conceive of.  
  
Her life had been defined by a world that most people would never see.  
  
She heard him, some nights. He sang to her, loved her, held her close and showed her the world that the two of them would create. Jareth was her other half. There was no Sarah without Jareth. Fool that she was, she had refused to believe him. Of course, she acknowledged ruefully, that had probably been a wise decision. When Jareth offered something, he never did so without a terrible price.  
  
She remembered the moment as though it had happened four minutes, rather than four years before.  
  
It had not been so very long after the Labyrinth that Jareth had come to her. Sarah had been barely sixteen, looking through her birthday gifts and marveling at the treasure trove she saw there. More than that, she had her first boyfriend, and had been enjoying the novel experience of dating.  
  
And then her lights had flickered and gone out, the world had taken on a sinister cast, and she had seen him, standing in the corner of her room, his platinum hair shining like moonlight on snow.  
  
"Hello, Sarah."  
  
Her surprise had lasted only moments. Then the cold anger had surfaced.  
  
"Get out."  
  
"Now, now, Sarah. Is that any way to treat a guest? One who has only come to wish you a happy birthday?"  
  
"Fine, and now you've done so. Thank you and goodbye," she whirled in an absolutely dazzling display of aloof dismissal. Unfortunately, Jareth had been undiscouraged.  
  
"Don't you want your present?" he had asked, his tone low and sultry.  
  
"No."  
  
"So cold, Sarah, so cruel. But it is of little concern to me how you feel now. Rest assured that the next few years will change many things for you."  
  
Sarah turned slowly, fear in her eyes. What was he planning to.Jareth began to laugh, undoubtedly at the unashamed fright that screamed from her very stance.  
  
"I am not going to curse you, Sarah. I have come to warn you."  
  
For a moment the world stopped spinning. Because for a moment, Sarah could have sworn she saw pity and anger brewing in the Goblin King's eyes; almost as though he were both sorry for what she might suffer and angry on her behalf. It was a pivotal moment in her life, and she saw it in hindsight with almost blinding clarity. It was the moment her defenses had first fallen by the wayside. She had raised them again in a mere fraction of a second, but Jareth had seen her weakness.  
  
"Warn me? Why would you bother?"  
  
"I would not wish upon any being what you will experience, Sarah."  
  
Her heart skipped a beat.  
  
"You were entrenched in the Labyrinth, and it changed you. You are slowly but surely becoming an Eternal One, one of the Faerie. And from this day forward, your world will change. You will see human beings and their structures for what they are, not what you believe them to be. All things in this world will slowly pale for you, as your dreams open to visions of the Underground. Nothing will be the same for you ever again, Sarah," the Goblin King said, and once again Sarah heard the faintest note of pity in his voice. It was quickly gone, replaced by his usual mocking tone. "I felt it unsporting for you to be unaware of it."  
  
Sarah's breathing sped up, and her pulse began skittering. Change.change how? But her mind had leapt ahead to recent memories. She already knew how. Fruits had tasted a little bland recently, and freshly washed laundry didn't have the same scent. She tensed and then began to shake. Jareth saw her reaction and his face went utterly blank.  
  
"Yes. Yes, Sarah. This world is a mere shadow of the Underground, and you will come to see that. All things will pale for you. Foods, sights, sounds, and.men."  
  
Sarah's eyes shot upward and she forced her body to stop trembling and held herself rigidly erect. She would not cave while he was here. She didn't believe him, wouldn't believe him.couldn't believe him.  
  
"Why? Why would the Labyrinth do that.to anyone, but especially to me? I haven't done anything."  
  
Jareth only smiled slightly and leaned over to cup her cheek with one leather covered hand. The contact lasted only moments, but Sarah felt something pass between them, saw a shadow she could not identify in Jareth's eyes. When he vanished she caught herself caressing her cheek with her own hand, seeking that contact.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Like a clock whose hands are sweeping  
  
Past the minutes on its face  
  
And the world is like an apple  
  
Whirling silently in space  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
It hadn't been long after that when the world began to change. Fruits and sweets had been the first things to pale, their tastes becoming something so far removed from the way she remembered them that it wasn't worth her time to eat them any longer. Other foods had followed quickly until eating became something she did as rarely as possible, and only to stay alive. Sounds were next. Ugly sounds, like traffic and alarm clocks, stayed the same, but music, ringing bells and violins.they no longer had any soul.  
  
Colors followed on the heels of sounds. The last thing to pale had been the sunset, and Sarah had wept openly when she realized that the fiery reds and brilliant oranges were no longer moving. They were shadows, she knew now, of all that existed in Faerie. In the Underground.  
  
And so it continued. People were not shadows, and another person might have found comfort in family and friends, and in the beginning Sarah had. But the next stage of her transformation tore her from her family; because Sarah began to understand. She saw in people, in plants and animals the threads that bound all of life to each other and to the Earth. She saw connections, she saw, to quote William Blake, the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower. She knew now all that humanity was missing by building their societies on metal, a substance that ought have stayed, for the most part, below ground. And because she saw, and others did not, Sarah drew away from humanity.  
  
They were not what she was becoming.  
  
The physical changes were the last stage. Her eyes became a clearer, more brilliant green, as her skin took on a brighter luster. Her hair became a deeper brown with brighter red and gold lights. And men noticed. But as Jareth had promised, men of that sort no longer interested her. She found them shallow, dull and frightfully predictable. Sarah was no longer one of them.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Like the circles that you find  
  
In the windmills of your mind *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
"I am destroyed, undone, and the world about me has lost all appeal," Sarah wrote in her journal. "There are songs to be sung, and dances to be learned, but I stand apart from that knowledge and the taste of my loss is bitter on my tongue."  
  
It seemed that she had grown poetic as she had changed. Sarah glared down at the page, then ripped it from her journal and tossed it aside. She had no desire to be poetic. She desired to be human again. Or did she? In her altered state, it almost seemed to her that the wind had words, phrases that she could barely hear but could make out if she strained with her ears and her mind. She sensed that there was another world, lurking just outside this one, that she belonged in. But she had no way to get there.  
  
And one night, it had all become too much. Sarah had thrown on a jacket, run to the park where she used to act scenes as a child and had screamed at the stars and the trees and the night.  
  
"Why is this happening to me? What did I do that was so terrible that I deserve this? WHAT?"  
  
An owl landed softly on a sculpture, and she whirled to face it, eyes flashing.  
  
"Did you do this to me? Did you make this happen?! I did nothing to you, nothing! I challenged you and I won, and for that, for my *success* you take away all that I was!"  
  
The anger seeped out of her limbs then, and left only bone deep weariness and a sense of penetrating loss.  
  
"I don't belong here, Jareth. This is my world and I don't belong here now. Please, please change me back. Please."  
  
The owl had looked at her with a longing that spoke of something she could not quite understand before it flew off. She had fallen to her knees then, gripping the ground so tightly that her nails bent slightly. She wanted to cry.  
  
But there were no tears left.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Keys that jingle in your pocket  
  
Words that jangle in your head  
  
Why did summer go so quickly?  
  
Was it something that I said?  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
Night had fallen fully by the time Sarah returned to her apartment. She kept an answering machine in case her boss needed to get in touch with her for some reason. Tonight there were no messages. Sarah tossed her purse onto the table and walked out onto her balcony. The quiet hum of nature surrounded her and Sarah closed her eyes.  
  
"I can't live like this," she said, quietly talking to the star she had claimed for her own. "I can't watch the world around me fade forever into the background. I won't do that."  
  
Eyes gleaming strangely in the night, Sarah turned to her empty apartment and challenged the Labyrinth, or the Goblin King, or maybe the gods themselves. "You did this to me. You made me like I am. And I know there is a reason. So now is your chance to explain to me just what it is that I am supposed to do with these *gifts*!"  
  
She hadn't really expected an answer. But she got one.  
  
Her apartment grew darker. Though Sarah knew intellectually that she wasn't moving, the doorway grew larger and reached out to swallow her body. The darkness rushed up to envelop her mind and Sarah opened her mouth to scream. She didn't get the chance.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Lovers walk along a shore  
  
And leave their footprints in the sand  
  
Was the sound of distant drumming  
  
Just the fingers of your hand?  
  
Pictures hanging in a hallway  
  
Or the fragment of a song  
  
Half-remembered names and faces  
  
But to whom do they belong?  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
The vision before her seemed clearer than if she were watching it on television, yet Sarah could tell that there was a barrier between her and the action before her. First she saw herself at fifteen, confronting the flamboyant Goblin King as the clock struck thirteen. The vision blurred slightly and she saw herself again at sixteen, afraid and yet defiant, and again with the Goblin King standing over her, the seeming cause of her distress. She saw herself in flashes, losing all that had been mortal in her body as her mortal life was burned away to reveal another layer of herself.  
  
She saw herself through a crystal wall and watched as her hand reached out and touched the barrier. It fell away.  
  
Then she was dancing, dancing with Jareth in a starlight garden, dancing and gazing up at him as though he were the only thing in her world that mattered at all. She watched as Jareth twirled her out and back in to his body, dipping her down before kissing her slowly, lavishly. The reflection of her laughed as he dipped her and moaned lightly as the kiss became something too hot for television. Sarah almost blushed..  
  
And then Jareth was walking with her in a garden. She loved him so much, wanted to spend her life with him. And to her amazement he suddenly stopped, dropped down to one knee and took her hand, proposing marriage in the most romantic way possible. And she felt the tears start to fall as she nodded quickly and beamed at the only man she would ever love, and laughed as he surged to his feet, the joy on his face incredible to behold.  
  
They were married, crowned King and Queen and Jareth was holding her tightly and kissing her softly and the world was perfect.  
  
And they were fighting, screaming at each other about something rather trivial. Jareth was furious, and Sarah was bent on throwing things. She started with a vase, which she threw at his head. Jareth swore as the vase flew by him and shattered on the stone.  
  
"That was a wedding present from my greant-aunt!" he yelled.  
  
"That old bat has no taste. I hate the vase and I hate your whole family!" Sarah returned.  
  
"Your family is no better!" he retorted.  
  
"Stop criticizing my family! You always fall back on my family if you have nothing better to throw at me!"  
  
"They make such an easy target!" Jareth bellowed.  
  
"So does your head!" Sarah shouted as she lobbed another piece of china at him.  
  
And the fight was fading as a tender scene replaced it. Sarah lying in the center of a hug bed, beaming down at the small person in her arms as Jareth lay beside her, arms wrapped around her and their newborn child. Sarah shuddered as she was tossed into the scene.  
  
"He's perfect, isn't he? Such a handsome little prince," Sarah crooned as their son opened his eyes and waved a fist around. Sarah caught it with one hand, her heart melting as her son wrapped his fist around her index finger.  
  
"He's the most wonderful thing I've ever seen, Sarah. I adore him. I adore you," Jareth murmured into her ear as the scene faded into something far more sensual.  
  
Jareth lay beside her, one hand reaching out to caress along a silken thigh, the creamy swell of her stomach. His hands were everywhere, stroking, touching, arousing. Sarah moaned lightly and squirmed as Jareth's lips kissed along her collar bone, along her throat and jaw line before fastening with a fiery passion on her mouth. Little cries and deeper moans were their music as Sarah reached out with her body to embrace her lover. Sarah squirmed to free her hands, fingers laced with Jareth's above their heads as the two of them spiraled down, down, down into a haze of passion.  
  
The crystal wall changed again, thrusting Sarah out of the vision. She saw Jareth resting silently on his bed. He was not asleep, but was looking pensively to one side. She saw that he was waiting, waiting for someone, for something. His face was a picture of patient grief, the understanding that half of a soul grants it's other half when the other half waltzes away to the music of the spheres. He was not angry, he was simply waiting - waiting for his heart to return to him. And she was stunned when she saw herself, standing in the doorway of his bedroom, standing in the shadows where she couldn't be seen, dressed as she had been today. The vision seemed so real, almost as if she could really take part in it.  
  
And Sarah understood.  
  
For the same reason that stars were born and lives were woven from the fabric of the universe, Jareth loved her. And Jareth was the Goblin King. He was not a mortal, he was an Eternal One, one of the Fae. Jareth needed an eternal mate, one who would not grow old and die, but who would stand beside him as the mortal world changed, faded and was reborn, as it had done so many times. And he had chosen her, a mortal. And so the Labyrinth had done for it's only son what it had never done before. It changed a mortal. Her.  
  
And now was the time for her to take control of her destiny.  
  
Sarah smiled, and without a second thought stepped forward into the vision and left the mortal world behind. She might return, and she might not, but for the time being, that didn't matter in the least. She had time for such decisions. That time was not now.  
  
"Jareth," she whispered. And Jareth turned in his bed of velvet and silk and she saw the leap of recognition, of joy in his eyes when he saw her.  
  
"You have come," he said, shock written on every word.  
  
"At last," Sarah breathed, tumbling her soul mate onto his bed and into their future.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Like a circle in a spiral  
  
Like a wheel within a wheel  
  
Never ending or beginning  
  
On an ever-spinning reel  
  
As the images unwind  
  
Like the circles that you find  
  
In the windmills of your mind *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* 


End file.
